I was determined, in spite of prohibitions and Campaigners, to see my old friend Clive, and insisted on walking back with the Colonel to his lodgings, at the door of which we met Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter. Rosa blushed up a little—looked at her mamma—and then greeted me with a hand and a curtsey. The Campaigner also saluted me in a majestic but amicable manner, made no objection even to my entering her apartments and seeing the condition to which they were reduced: this phrase was uttered with particular emphasis and a significant look towards the Colonel, who bowed his meek head and preceded me into the lodgings, which were in truth very homely, pretty, and comfortable. The Campaigner was an excellent manager—restless, bothering, brushing perpetually. Such fugitive gimcracks as they had brought away with them decorated the little salon. Mrs. Mackenzie, who took the entire command, even pressed me to dine and partake, if so fashionable a gentleman would condescend to partake, of a humble exile’s fare. No fare was perhaps very pleasant to me in company with that woman, but I wanted to see my dear old Clive, and gladly accepted his voluble mother-in-law’s not disinterested hospitality. She beckoned the Colonel aside; whispered to him, putting something into his hand; on which he took his hat and went away. Then Rosey was dismissed upon some other pretext, and I had the felicity to be left alone with Mrs. Captain Mackenzie.
She instantly improved the occasion; and with great eagerness and volubility entered into her statement of the present affairs and position of this unfortunate family. She described darling Rosey’s delicate state, poor thing—nursed with tenderness and in the lap of luxury—brought up with every delicacy and the fondest mother—never knowing in the least how to take care of herself, and likely to fall down and perish unless the kind Campaigner were by to prop and protect her. She was in delicate health—very delicate—ordered cod-liver oil by the doctor. Heaven knows how he could be paid for those expensive medicines out of the pittance to which the imprudence—the most culpable and designing imprudence, and extravagance, and folly of Colonel Newcome had reduced them! Looking out from the window as she spoke I saw—we both saw—the dear old gentleman sadly advancing towards the house, a parcel in his hand. Seeing his near approach, and that our interview was likely to come to an end, Mrs. Mackenzie rapidly whispered to me that she knew I had a good heart—that I had been blessed by Providence with a fine fortune, which I knew how to keep better than some folks—and that if, as no doubt was my intention—for with what other but a charitable view could I have come to see them?—“and most generous and noble was it of you to come, and I always thought it of you, Mr. Pendennis, whatever other people said to the contrary—if I proposed to give them relief, which was most needful—and for which a mother’s blessings would follow me—let it be to her, the Campaigner, that my loan should be confided—for as for the Colonel, he is not fit to be trusted with a shilling, and has already flung away immense sums upon some old woman he keeps in the country, leaving his darling Rosey without the actual necessaries of life.
The woman’s greed and rapacity—the flattery with which she chose to belabour me at dinner, so choked and disgusted me, that I could hardly swallow the meal, though my poor old friend had been sent out to purchase a pâté from the pastrycook’s for my especial refection. Clive was not at the dinner. He seldom returned till late at night on sketching days. Neither his wife nor his mother-in-law seemed much to miss him; and seeing that the Campaigner engrossed the entire share of the conversation, and proposed not to leave me for five minutes alone with the Colonel, I took leave rather speedily of my entertainers, leaving a message for Clive, and a prayer that he would come and see me at my hotel.
CHAPTER LXXIII.
In which Belisarius returns from Exile
I was sitting in the dusk in my room at Hotel des Bains, when the visitor for whom I hoped made his appearance in the person of Clive, with his broad shoulders, and broad hat, and a shaggy beard, which he had thought fit in his quality of painter to assume. Our greeting it need not be said was warm; and our talk, which extended far into the night, very friendly and confidential. If I make my readers confidants in Mr. Clive’s private affairs, I ask my friend’s pardon for narrating his history in their behoof. The world had gone very ill with my poor Clive, and I do not think that the pecuniary losses which had visited him and his father afflicted him near so sorely as the state of his home. In a pique with the woman he loved, and from that generous weakness which formed part of his character, and which led him to acquiesce in most wishes of his good father, the young man had gratified the darling desire of the Colonel’s heart, and taken the wife whom his two old friends brought to him. Rosey, who was also, as we have shown, of a very obedient and ductile nature, had acquiesced gladly enough in her mamma’s opinion, that she was in love with the rich and handsome young Clive, and accepted him for better or worse. So undoubtedly would this good child have accepted Captain Hoby, her previous adorer, have smilingly promised fidelity to the Captain at church, and have made a very good, happy, and sufficient little wife for that officer,—had not mamma commanded her to jilt him. What wonder that these elders should wish to see their two dear young ones united? They began with suitable age, money, good temper, and parents’ blessings. It is not the first time that, with all these excellent helps to prosperity and happiness, a marriage has turned out unfortunately—a pretty, tight ship gone to wreck that set forth on its voyage with cheers from the shore, and every prospect of fair wind and fine weather.
We have before quoted poor Clive’s simile of the shoes with which his good old father provided him—as pretty a little pair of shoes as need be—only they did not fit the wearer. If they pinched him at first, how they blistered and tortured him now! If Clive was gloomy and discontented even when the honeymoon had scarce waned, and he and his family sat at home in state and splendour under the boughs of the famous silver cocoa-nut tree, what was the young man’s condition now in poverty, when they had no love along with a scant dinner of herbs; when his mother-in-law grudged each morsel which his poor old father ate—when a vulgar, coarse-minded woman pursued with brutal sarcasm and deadly rancour one of the tenderest and noblest gentlemen in the world—when an ailing wife, always under some one’s domination, received him with helpless hysterical cries and reproaches—when a coarse female tyrant, stupid, obstinate, utterly unable to comprehend the son’s kindly genius, or the father’s gentle spirit, bullied over both, using the intolerable undeniable advantage which her actual wrongs gave her to tyrannise over these two wretched men! He had never heard the last of that money which they had sent to Mrs. Mason, Clive said. When the knowledge of the fact came to the Campaigner’s ears, she raised such a storm as almost killed the poor Colonel, and drove his son half mad. She seized the howling infant, vowing that its unnatural father and grandfather were bent upon starving it—she consoled and sent Rosey into hysterics—she took the outlawed parson to whose church they went, and the choice society of bankrupt captains, captains’ ladies, fugitive stockbrokers’ wives, and dingy frequenters of billiard-rooms, and refugees from the Bench, into her councils; and in her daily visits amongst these personages, and her walks on the pier, whither she trudged with poor Rosey in her train, Mrs. Mackenzie made known her own wrongs and her daughter’s—showed how the Colonel, having robbed and cheated them previously, was now living upon them; insomuch that Mrs. Bolter, the levanting auctioneer’s wife, would not make the poor old man a bow when she met him—that Mrs. Captain Kitely, whose husband had lain for seven years past in Boulogne gaol ordered her son to cut Clive; and when, the child being sick, the poor old Colonel went for arrowroot to the chemist’s, young Snooks, the apothecary’s assistant, refused to allow him to take the powder away without previously depositing the money.
He had no money, Thomas Newcome. He gave up every farthing. After having impoverished all around him, he had no right, he said, to touch a sixpence of the wretched pittance remaining to them—he had even given up his cigar, the poor old man, the companion and comforter of forty years. He was “not fit to be trusted with money,” Mrs. Mackenzie said, and the good man owned as he ate his scanty crust, and bowed his noble old head in silence under that cowardly persecution.
And this, at the end of threescore and seven or eight years, was to be the close of a life which had been spent in freedom and splendour, and kindness and honour; this the reward of the noblest heart that ever beat—the tomb and prison of a gallant warrior who had ridden in twenty battles—whose course through life had been a bounty wherever it had passed—whose name had been followed by blessings, and whose career was to end here—here—in a mean room, in a mean alley of a foreign town—a low furious woman standing over him and stabbing the kind defenceless heart with killing insult and daily outrage!
As we sat together in the dark, Clive told me this wretched story, which was wrung from him with a passionate emotion that I could not but keenly share. He wondered the old man lived, Clive said. Some of the women’s taunts and gibes, as he could see, struck his father so that he gasped and started back as if some one had lashed him with a whip. “He would make away with himself,” said poor Clive, “but he deems this is his punishment, and that he must bear it as long as it pleases God. He does not care for his own losses, as far as they concern himself: but these reproaches of Mrs. Mackenzie, and some things which were said to him in the Bankruptcy Court, by one or two widows of old friends, who were induced through his representations, to take shares in that infernal bank, have affected him dreadfully. I hear him lying awake and groaning at night, God bless him. Great God! what can I do—what can I do?” burst out the young man in a dreadful paroxysm of grief. “I have tried to get lessons—I went to London on the deck of a steamer, and took a lot of drawings with me—tried picture-dealers—pawnbrokers—Jews—Moss, whom you may remember at Gandish’s, and who gave me for forty-two drawings, eighteen pounds. I brought the money back to Boulogne. It was enough to pay the doctor, and bury our last poor little dead baby. Tenez, Pen, you must give me some supper: I have had nothing all day but a pain de deux sous; I can’t stand it at home. My heart’s almost broken—you must give me some money, Pen, old boy. I know you will. I thought of writing to you, but I wanted to support myself, you see. When I went to London with the drawings I tried George’s chambers, but he was in the country, I saw Crackthorpe on the street in Oxford Street, but I could not face him, and bolted down Hanway Yard. I tried, and I could not ask him, and I got the 18 pounds from Moss that day, and came home with it.”
Give him money? of course I would give him money—my dear old friend! And, as an alternative and a wholesome shock to check that burst of passion and grief in which the poor fellow indulged, I thought fit to break into a very fierce and angry invective on my own part, which served to disguise the extreme feeling of pain and pity that I did not somehow choose to exhibit. I rated Clive soundly, and taxed him with unfriendliness and ingratitude for not having sooner applied to friends who would think shame of themselves whilst he was in need. Whatever he wanted was his as much as mine. I could not understand how the necessity of the family should, in truth, be so extreme as he described it, for after all many a poor family lived upon very much less; but I uttered none of these objections, checking them with the thought that Clive, on his first arrival at Boulogne, entirely ignorant of the practice of economy, might have imprudently engaged in expenses which had reduced him to this present destitution.*